It took a few days to sink in, but within a week or so after the elections of 1994, there was general agreement that the astounding Republican sweep and the correlative Democratic disaster represented something deeper than a mere swing of the political pendulum.

Of course some Democrats tried to rationalize, explain away, or even deny the dimensions of their defeat. Like their predecessors who attributed the Republican landslides of 1972, 1980, and 1984 to the poor quality of their candidates, these Democrats blamed Bill Clinton for the debacle of 1994. Though the President himself was not running this time, they said, his unpopularity had rubbed off on most of the Democrats who were.

Yet the Democrats who took this line professed to be mystified by Clinton’s low ratings. After all, the economy was growing nicely; the deficit was down; a great crime bill had passed; and things were going well in Haiti, Korea, and the Middle East. Why was Clinton—and, by extension, his party—not getting credit for these achievements?

One tempting answer was a failure of communication. But this explanation was hard to accept, given Clinton’s universally admired skills as a communicator.

The fallback theory, which had become more and more widely accepted during the campaign as the polls more and more clearly registered the breadth and depth of voter discontent, was that an anti-incumbent fever was sweeping the land. Unfortunately for this theory, the only incumbents who lost on election day were Democrats. Not a single Republican holding office in the House, in the Senate, or in the Governors’ mansions was replaced by a Democrat. Of a total of 177 of these Republican incumbents, not one, anywhere, was unseated. On top of winning control of both houses of Congress, the Republicans captured 11 Governors’ mansions that were previously occupied either by Democrats or independents. And whereas the Republicans retained control of all the state legislative chambers in which they already had a majority, a minimum of 15 chambers¹ formerly controlled by the Democrats were captured by the Republicans and three more wound up evenly split thanks to Republican gains.

This stunning set of results was pooh-poohed by one of Clinton’s pollsters who pointed out that it had been brought about by a mere 2-percent shift to the Republicans in the aggregate vote. But such complacency ignored the fact that to beat an incumbent even narrowly is a hard thing to do (since incumbents almost always have more money); not to mention the fact that in beating enough of them to take control of both houses of Congress, the Republicans managed a stunt that had not been pulled off for 40 years; and not to mention the additional fact that they did this without any help from the coattails of a popular leader.

The same amazing facts were even more fatal to the desperate theory espoused by the President himself. The voters, Clinton said at his morning-after press conference, were dissatisfied with the pace and the amount of progress he had already made toward the goals they had elected him to achieve.

Obviously, however, if that were the case, the Democrats would have won more seats in Congress—enough to prevent the Republicans from “obstructing” the programs and policies allegedly favored by a majority of the American people. Instead the voters did the opposite—and the Republicans they elected to replace Democratic incumbents were almost entirely drawn from the conservative wing of the party.

A variant of Clinton’s theory was put forward by Jesse Jackson and other leftists. They argued that Clinton had indeed been moving too slowly and hesitantly in their direction and had thereby failed to energize his liberal base. With minorities and women and the unions sitting on their hands because of their disappointment with the President, the field had been abandoned to the zealots of the Right whose appeals to hatred and fear had brought out their troops in disproportionate numbers.

The element of truth in Jackson’s version of the theory concerned the unhappiness of many on the Left with Clinton. But it was ridiculous to conclude that if he had governed in such a way as to make them enthusiastic, the Democrats would have won. For the exit polls, and a wealth of other evidence, revealed that it was precisely the kind of big-government liberalism these groups on the Left advocate that was so roundly repudiated in 1994. And it was precisely to the extent that Clinton was already seen as one of them that he hurt his party as a whole.

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Which brings us to Clinton the politician. He is often praised, even by Republicans, as a master politician, by which they seem to mean that he is the “comeback kid” who never gives up and can never be written off. Yet what is most striking and most surprising about his performance in office these past two years is its gross political ineptitude.

His first mistake, right out of the gate, was recklessly exposing the degree to which he was still what Congressman Newt Gingrich would later call (to much disingenuous derision and indignation among liberals) a “counterculture McGovernik.”² This he did by denying his centrist “New Democratic” base any but a minor role in his administration, by making appointments on the basis of race and gender, and by trying to force the military to accept openly homosexual recruits.

Having thus offended the New Democrats, he turned around and angered the labor movement with his support of NAFTA. At the same time he disturbed many blacks (or at any rate the black caucus in Congress) when he backed away from his choice of the black radical Lani Guinier to head the civil-rights division of the Justice Department. He then tried to make it up to the black caucus by changing his policy on Haiti and deciding to invade. Yet not even the success (so far) of that operation brought him much credit with anyone else, since no one else cared much one way or the other about Haiti (though there would certainly have been an outcry if American troops had been killed there).

Whatever the particular merits of these various positions (I for one think Clinton was wrong about gays in the military and right about NAFTA, for example), together they managed to put off old supporters without attracting new ones: the very definition of political incompetence.

But of course the most compelling evidence of Clinton’s ineptitude as a politician was his healthcare plan. It was bad enough that, having been elected with only 43 percent of the vote, he imagined that he actually had a mandate to revolutionize a major sector of American society, and that he thought his overbearing wife, who seems to be politically tone-deaf altogether, was the right person to execute this mandate. What made it even worse was his blindness to the reality that in the America of the 1990’s the idea of a government takeover of medical care—or, for that matter, of anything else—ran counter to the political winds that would blow so many Democrats away in 1994. (In case any doubts later remained about this, a post-election poll sponsored by the Democratic Leadership Council showed, according to the New York Times, that “Mr. Clinton’s proposal to overhaul the national health-care system had been devastating to the Democrats because it had become a symbol of big government”)

Even Clinton’s skills as a campaigner, which seemed so formidable when he was running for President, deserted him in 1994. Thus, when the Republicans issued their “Contract with America,” Clinton—evidently under the illusion that it was Ronald Reagan rather than George Bush he had beaten in 1992 and that it was smart politics to run against Reagan again—gleefully joined his fellow Democrats in attacking the contract as an effort “to take us back to the failed policies of the 80’s.”

Not only did presenting the election as a choice between him and Reagan help ensure the defeat of his party; it also made it easier for the Republicans to interpret their victory as, precisely, a mandate to return (in the words of the columnist Charles Krauthammer) “to Reagan’s central vision of relimiting and, in some areas, de-legitimizing government.” In that sense, another columnist, George Will, was exactly right in calling this election Reagan’s third victory.

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Curiously, however, the response by liberals to Newt Gingrich’s prospective accession to power in 1995 as Speaker of the House was much more hysterical than the reaction to Reagan’s first victory in 1980. There were a few predictable warnings in 1980 about an “incipient fascism,” but on the whole the liberal press was surprisingly benign. For instance, Tom Wicker, then a columnist for the New York Times, declared:

If Mr. Reagan can demonstrate . . . that he’s in control, knows where he wants to go, and has a reasonable sense of how to get there, that assurance alone will cause Americans to sustain him in many a disappointment along the way.

Even Wicker’s more strident colleague, Anthony Lewis, warning his fellow Americans that Reagan would soon make changes they would deplore, advised them to abandon their euphoria in favor of—not wariness or determined opposition, but “modified rapture.”

Here, by contrast, is how Lewis greeted the prospect of Gingrich’s elevation to Speaker of the House:

Slash and burn, knife and smear: the Gingrich instincts are unrelenting. Herblock got it right in his Washington Post cartoon when he had Mr. Gingrich crawling out of the same sewer where he portrayed Richard Nixon years ago.

A few days earlier a Times editorialist had traced Gingrich’s political lineage to the racist demagogues of the Old South. Not to be outdone, Lewis slyly conjured up the ghost of Joe McCarthy by urging Clinton to deal with Gingrich by following the example of Harry Truman who “had the courage to veto foolish anti-Communist bills at the height of the cold war.”

The New Yorker’s Sidney Blumenthal also saw the ghosts of Nixon and McCarthy hiding under Gingrich’s bed:

. . . Mr. Gingrich promises endless investigations into putative Clinton scandals. Though the spectacle is likely to be pale compared with the ferreting out of un-American activities by Nixon and McCarthy, it will nonetheless be part of the restoration, providing a link with tradition.

To Anna Quindlen of the Times, on the other hand, there was nothing pale about the spectacle of Gingrich himself. He was now, she charged, “the most powerful public purveyor” of “the single most pernicious force in American discourse,” an “ethos [which] makes so much bigotry possible: racism, sexism, homophobia,” and which is driving the Republican party “into the fallow ground of meanness, the purview of the schoolyard bully, picking off the weaker one by one.”

Such rhetoric was entirely characteristic of coverage of Gingrich in the liberal media. In fact, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs, which tabulates favorable as against unfavorable references on the CBS, NBC, and ABC evening-news broadcasts, Gingrich’s rating during the campaign was 100-percent negative! Herblock may have placed Gingrich in the sewer he originally created for Nixon, but I doubt that even Nixon ever matched Gingrich’s perfect record on network television. As the Times’s Frank Rich frankly admitted, “foaming at the mouth about Newt Gingrich” was now the liberals’ “new addiction”—not that this prevented Rich from going on to take a shot of the new drug himself by “regurgitating . . . the new liberal catechism,” complete with invocations of Nixon and McCarthy.

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What accounts for this outburst of hysteria? The most obvious factor is frustration and disappointment. When Clinton was elected in 1992, liberals were elated by the prospect of a return to political power after twelve long years in exile. Clinton himself might not have been the ideal leader of this liberal “restoration” (to borrow Sidney Blumenthal’s term and apply it to a much more appropriate context), but he was certainly better than nothing and his heart seemed to be in the right place.

In any case, no less an authority than the famous historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. had assured his fellow liberals that Clinton’s election placed them at the beginning of a new 30-year cycle of “affirmative government.” Now, instead of being able to look forward to 28 more years of political dominance, liberalism suddenly and unexpectedly finds itself more naked unto its worst enemies than ever before.

Compounding liberal frustration and disappointment, then, is a strong dose of fear. For there is no doubt that Gingrich’s hostility to liberalism and all its works is serious. When he says that he wants to deconstruct the welfare state (the one species of deconstruction the liberal culture dislikes), and also to lead a battle against “counterculture McGoverniks” and “secular left-wing values,” he means it. What is more, he is convinced that the American people are solidly on his side.

It seems evident to me that behind the hysteria of the liberal media is the awful suspicion that Gingrich may be right about the contemporary popular mood. And behind the effort to demonize him is the hope that all this vilification will frighten him into backing off—that is, that he will “grow” in office, as so many other firebrands have done before him in response to attacks by the liberal culture.

Schlesinger, writing in the Wall Street Journal, expresses this hope explicitly:

The interesting conflict in the months ahead may not be so much a Republican Congress vs. a Democratic President, as Newt Gingrich vs. Bob Dole. Mr. Dole, for all his sardonic oppositionist wit, is at heart a constructive and responsible leader. . . . Will the cocky Speaker now defer to his more thoughtful and experienced colleague, who is after all merely the Republican leader in the Senate?

Nothing daunted by the humiliating refutation the 1994 election supplied to his earlier predictions (whose only recent rival for total wrong-headedness are the forecasts of heavy American casualties made in 1990 by opponents of the Gulf war), Schlesinger steps right up to the plate with another one. If, he warns, Gingrich does not mend his rambunctious ways, he will be so discredited and so marginalized that most people will be ashamed to associate themselves with his policies:

Indeed, Speaker Gingrich will very likely emerge as God’s gift to the Democrats. His take-no-prisoners truculence, his ideological anti-government extremism, and his unbridled tongue will not persuade many outside the Bible Belt and the old Confederacy.

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In my opinion, Schlesinger’s speculations about Gingrich will go the way of his assurances in 1992 that the election of Clinton marked a turn in the political tide toward a renewed faith in big-government liberalism. Gingrich will not be intimidated by cries of racism, sexism, and homophobia from the New York Times and the Washington Post and the newsmagazines and the TV networks. I think he has written them all off anyway and that he will continue to use the same alternative channels—the radio talk shows, C-Span, and other cable-television outlets—that he relied on to get his message across in the first place.

Nor will support for the direction in which he wants to move the country be confined to what Schlesinger—still failing in his smugly provincial way to understand what is going on politically in America today—dismisses as the Bible Belt and the old Confederacy (by which, of course, he means all the people he considers fanatics and rednecks, yahoos and troglodytes).

Surely if the election of 1994 proved anything, it was that most Americans everywhere—and not just fundamentalist Christians and white Southerners—have lost their faith in the vast network of social programs originally spawned by the Democrats in the 1960’s. People all over this country (including even a few liberals) now understand that these programs, far from winning the “war on poverty” they were launched to fight, have had a great deal to do with the spread of illegitimacy and violent crime.

Furthermore, it is clear from all the polling data that most Americans everywhere have also turned decisively and definitively against the more novel instrumentalities the country has inherited from the 1960’s, especially affirmative action, quotas, and reverse discrimination. Whether with respect to blacks or to women, these are now regarded by large majorities as unfair, as damaging to the economy, and as harmful to the relations both between the races and between the sexes.

Nor is it merely in “the Bible Belt and the old Confederacy” that more and more people agree with Gingrich about the damage done to our society by the assault on middle-class morality and the promulgation of sexual libertinism of every variety which stemmed from the counterculture of the 1960’s. Like Schlesinger, Frank Rich makes fun of conservatives who blame the counterculture “for everything immoral, violent, and sexually explicit in American culture today.” Pathetic rubes that they are, Rich chortles, they seem not to have noticed that the counterculture “was long ago annexed by a corporate culture that employs the Beatles’ ‘Revolution’ to hawk Nikes.” But the joke is on Rich, who seems not to have noticed that it is this very trickle-down effect—this seepage into the entire society of attitudes and mores that were once confined to a radical fringe—that alarms most Americans. Which is why in one recent poll, for example, 54 percent of the respondents declared that “the social and economic problems that face America are mainly the result of a decline in moral values.”

The poll did not ask what was to blame for this decline, but given that approximately 90 percent of Americans profess belief in God and that more than 50 percent are to be found in church every Sunday, it would be amazing if the “secular left-wing values” attacked by Gingrich were not held at least partly responsible.

In short, the American people do support Gingrich’s twin assaults on the entrenched institutions of the welfare state and the moral legacy of the counterculture. And no more than Gingrich himself are they any longer likely to be prevented by cries of racism, sexism, and homophobia from applauding an honest debate on these issues.

Indeed, my own guess is that they relish Gingrich’s aggressive candor, which contrasts so sharply with the protective coloration that devitalizes the usual run of political babble. (Even an enemy like Frank Rich makes an invidious comparison between Clinton’s “flip-flopping” and Gingrich’s “forthrightness about his views, his vivid use of language, his ferocious tenacity, and rigid focus.”) At a time when politicians are vastly unpopular, it becomes an asset not to sound like one, from which it follows that the worst thing Gingrich could do would be to start talking in “statesmanlike” tones.

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The one bright spot in this picture for the Democrats and the liberal elites in general is their expectation that the counterrevolution will fail.

The most outlandish expression of this expectation came from Peter Jennings of ABC, who declared:

The voters had a temper tantrum last week. . . . Now what? The screaming two-year-old has our attention, but the country, like the family, can’t run for long on vituperation. . . . No matter what a politician might tell us, and perhaps even believe, there are no quick solutions to many of the complications we face in the late 20th century. . . . The country can’t be run by an angry two-year-old.

Others, adopting a more moderate tone, say that if the Republicans keep their promise to cut taxes, the deficit will grow (since the only spending cuts Congress will dare to make will be insufficient to compensate for the loss of revenue), and inflation will heat up again. Nor, the Democrats claim, will Republican programs give us safer streets or better schools or fewer illegitimate babies. And Thomas B. Edsall of the Washington Post adds an interesting fillip when he writes:

Underpinning the revolution in American politics that took place Tuesday [November 8] are forces challenging not just Democratic liberalism but the dominant liberal culture in ways that are going to be very difficult for the newly ascendant Republican party to satisfy.

Well, about all that we shall see soon enough. But the counterrevolution may not be required to deliver everything all at once. It may be sufficient—for the voters as well as for the good of the country—if a beginning can be made in reducing the harm that the federal government has been doing in so many areas of our national life.

The reason this may be sufficient is that the Republicans are not being asked to substitute new government programs for the old ones created by the Democrats. As William Kristol—who heads the Project for the Republican Future and who is for all practical purposes the intellectual leader of his party—puts it: “The GOP challenge is an odd one. . . . Having grasped the reins of power, the Republican party must be disciplined enough to give that power away.” Not, of course, to the Democrats, but to the people, through “sharply limited government, lower taxes, . . . and the reduction—even termination—of destructive or ineffective social-welfare programs.”

Giving power away does not involve total passivity. It means, says Kristol, that “Republicans will pursue a broad and ambitious agenda of conservative reform: welfare reform, health-care reform, legal reform, and economic-growth incentives. . . .”

Again, however, the goal of these reforms remains directly antithetical to what the liberal agenda tries to achieve: the conservative purpose is not to extend but to reduce the range of government intervention and to cede “greater authority to individuals and families,” as well as to “average Americans and entrepreneurs.” The theory behind it all is that the problems the federal government has either been unable to solve, or has exacerbated by attempting to solve, can more effectively be dealt with at the local level and by individuals and families and churches and neighborhood groups.

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Newt Gingrich and his fellow counterrevolutionaries are persuaded that this theory, in essence, is what the American people were voting for in November 1994.1 think the counterrevolutionaries are right. For more than 30 years, Americans have been living in a totally politicized world—a world in which everything has been sucked into the political realm. In such a world every problem is thought to have its roots in social forces and therefore to have a political solution: in such a world even the personal, as the feminists (and not they alone) like to proclaim, is political. Weary unto death of this way of looking at life, thoroughly disabused of the illusions it has fostered, and choking on the pathologies it has encouraged, Americans are experiencing what might be described as a withdrawal of affect from politics.

It is a feeling best and most succinctly expressed in the 18th century in a couplet by Dr. Johnson: “How small, of all that human hearts endure, / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.” The rest, the larger part—so Dr. Johnson implies—is up to God, and to us.

This, I suggest, captures the deeper meaning of the disgust with politicians, and with Washington, that came out in the campaigns of 1994 and that accounted for the defeat of so many Democratic incumbents and the election of so many conservative proponents of limited government.

Sensing this deeper meaning, the defenders of contemporary liberalism, which is based on the opposite view of life, have been driven to a frenzy. Their hold over our major cultural institutions—the national media, the universities, the arts both popular and high—remains firm, and from these protected sanctuaries they will carry on a ferocious guerrilla war against Newt Gingrich and his followers. But in their hearts they know that in the political sphere at least they are losing their power to define what is mainstream or respectable and what is marginal or extremist; knowing this they also know that their political influence in the present and their prospects for the future are very dim indeed. No wonder their hysteria has reached so feverish a pitch.

¹ As of this writing, the final tallies were not in yet.

² A rare exception to this disingenuous outcry on the Left was an honest piece in the Village Voice by Ellen Willis. Unlike, say, Frank Rich of the New York Times, who scoffed at Gingrich for identifying Clinton—“a non-inhaling Fleetwood Mac fan, of all unlikely hippies”—with the counterculture, Willis acknowledged that “The Clintons are inescapably 60's figures. Their history, their body language, their visceral response to social issues carries the imprint of sex, drugs, rock and roll, Vietnam protest, and feminism—a cultural taint no amount of pandering to big business, religion, and family values can wipe out.”